Laravel PHP Framework vs. Symfony

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Laravel PHP Framework
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Laravel is a free, open source web application PHP framework.N/A
Symfony
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Symfony is a PHP framework from French company SensioLabs.N/A
Pricing
Laravel PHP FrameworkSymfony
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Laravel PHP FrameworkSymfony
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Laravel PHP FrameworkSymfony
Considered Both Products
Laravel PHP Framework
Chose Laravel PHP Framework
The best comparison I can make is against Symfony. It's curious that Laravel is built on top of Symfony. They chose the packages that they found to be useful. Symfony for instance comes with way too much stuff that in the end you never use, and Laravel just comes with the right …
Chose Laravel PHP Framework
Laravel is built on top of Symfony so is naturally a better upgrade. It is far superior than cake and igniter (in my opinion). I don't remember, but somewhere in internet someone made a comparison with Laravel and others as racing motor-bike vs a cycle. Because of large …
Chose Laravel PHP Framework
Originally, it was a decision between Zend, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP for me. I chose CakePHP and used it as my main PHP framework for at least a couple of years before noticing and giving Laravel a fair try. Ultimately I selected Laravel because I felt it fit with my preferred …
Chose Laravel PHP Framework
In my experience, if a development team is using an MVC framework that's not Laravel, they're doing one of two things:

1. Using an older framework like Code Igniter, CakePHP, or one of the many dozen others
Chose Laravel PHP Framework
I inherited Laravel projects originally created by other developers. I haven't migrated clients at this time, however as the project gets bigger and I need to find more elaborate workarounds to address needs that option will be put on the table.
Symfony
Chose Symfony
I would say Laravel is by far Symfony's greatest rival. Laravel was actually a PHP framework that appears from Symfony, using only the packages that it really required. After some years, both projects have grown apart significantly, but you can still see Laravel using some of …
Chose Symfony
Symfony was chosen by previous developers, presumably for its flexibility and community support at a time when it was one of the best.
Chose Symfony
Symfony has become such a standard that many frameworks which previously may have been seen as competition, are actually adopting Symfony components to allow them to focus more on what makes their solution unique. Drupal 8 has replaced much of its low-level internal code with …
Chose Symfony
We've compared Symfony to Laravel, Zend, Drupal, and Silex (as well as to pure PHP) and it was so far the most convenient tool for enterprise scalable products. Among all compared, Laravel was next in line in terms of the convenience and ease. Drupal used to be popular, but now …
Chose Symfony
Symfony is strengthened by its amazing set of components. It is more flexible and strong, now with the introduction of flex on Symfony 4.x it's even more flexible and adapting for the future. Its architecture is robust and allows developers to focus on products. Symfony has …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Laravel PHP FrameworkSymfony
Small Businesses
CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter
Score 8.0 out of 10
Laravel PHP Framework
Laravel PHP Framework
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Symfony
Symfony
Score 9.3 out of 10
Laravel PHP Framework
Laravel PHP Framework
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Laravel PHP FrameworkSymfony
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(17 ratings)
8.0
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Laravel PHP FrameworkSymfony
Likelihood to Recommend
Open Source
Laravel is ideally suited for fluent PHP developers who want a framework that can be used to both rapidly prototype web applications as well as support scalable, enterprise-level solutions. I think where it is less ideal is where the client has an expectation of using a certain CMS, or of having a certain experience on the admin side that would perhaps be better suited to a full CMS such as Drupal or WordPress. Additionally, for developers who don't want to write PHP code, Laravel may not be the best solution.
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SensioLabs
Any small project which you want to have ready in a couple of hours would be probably a bad candidate for using Symfony. Even the most seasoned senior developer can easily spend hours or days creating a small MVP with Symfony. While Symfony's learning curve isn't necessarily bad and will depend a lot on the architectural knowledge of the developer itself, because of the modularity required by Symfony you will need to spend a significant amount of time coding. If you are looking for a quick project, perhaps this framework isn't the best solution. Robust applications can benefit from Symfony's architecture. I have participated in projects on different industries including lead generation, marketing and even some micro-services for other industries which use Symfony. Because of how thorough the framework has been architected, you will have a reliable solution.
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Pros
Open Source
  • Many libraries available which simplify integration of SaaS APIs within your application (eg, MailChimp, Mandrill, Stripe, Authorize.net)
  • Pre-packaged tools to facilitate common tasks when building applications (eg, User Authentication and Authorization, Background Jobs, Queues, etc)
  • Support for a broad set of technologies out of the box (eg, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MemcacheD, BeanstalkD, Redis, etc)
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SensioLabs
  • Sonata Admin for Symfony is very versatile and we've used it for both the admin part of our website (even created a landing page constructor using it) and for the ERP system we've developed for inside use.
  • It is easy to learn if you know PHP and the community is quite large so you can easily find experts to help you with issues.
  • It's good for high-load projects. We have used it for the back-end of a custom affiliate marketing system that currently processes over 180 million requests per day.
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Cons
Open Source
  • Significant learning curve. You cannot be an expert in a week. It takes many experimentations to properly understand the underlying concept. We ourselves learned it by using it on the job.
  • Too much to soak in. Laravel is in everything. Any part of backend development you wish to do, Laravel has a way to do that. It is great, but also overwhelming at the same time.
  • Vendor lock in. Once you are in Laravel, it would not be easy to switch to something else.
  • Laracasts (their online video tutorials) are paid :( I understand the logic behind it, but I secretly wish it would be free.
  • The eloquent ORM is not my recommendation. Let's say you want to write a join, and based on the result you wish to create two objects. If you use Laravel to do automatic joins for you, Laravel internally actually makes two calls to database and creates your two object rather than making one join call and figuring out the results. This makes your queries slow. For this reason, I use everything except eloquent from Laravel. I rather write my own native queries and control the creation of objects then rely on Laravel to do it. But I am sure with time Laravel will make fewer calls to DB.
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SensioLabs
  • There are so many ways to do things that FAQs around the internet may not work for the way you did it.
  • The default database ORM doctrine is not well documented and has a large learning curve when optimizing for high traffic.
  • Matching the Symfony version with your selection of bundles makes it difficult to upgrade bundles because many things change between updates.
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Support Rating
Open Source
No answers on this topic
SensioLabs
Symfony has a great following and finding relevant articles or looking into social channels for support is quite easy. I have no comments on any type of official support because I didn't ever need to look into it.
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Alternatives Considered
Open Source
Supporting unit testing is bigger plus point in Laravel than any other framework. Developing with Laravel is much easier. Other frameworks have value in market, but Laravel has taken the lead in popularity among PHP developers in recent years. The large community supports you if you have problems. Using Laravel, integration became easy with third-party libraries, but it was costly too.
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SensioLabs
Symfony has become such a standard that many frameworks which previously may have been seen as competition, are actually adopting Symfony components to allow them to focus more on what makes their solution unique. Drupal 8 has replaced much of its low-level internal code with Symfony components. Laravel utilizes much from Symfony and builds on it. CakePHP was my preferred framework over Zend and CodeIgniter, but now I typically prefer Symfony or Laravel depending on the type of application and complexity of what I'm doing.
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Return on Investment
Open Source
  • Laravel allows us to rapidly prototype and build complete, scalable applications internally, which saves us time and allows us to have internal tools that fit out precise needs. We use Symfony for a similar purpose, but Laravel is an even higher-level framework that we find saves us substantially more time when building many types of web applications.
  • Laravel solves many of the underlying concerns of building a large application (such as authentication, authorization, secure input handling) in the right ways. It saves us from handling those low-level concerns ourselves, potentially in a way that could take a lot of time or sets us up for issues in the future. It's tough to assign an ROI to this, but I'm sure it has prevented issues and saved time, which both have an impact on our financial situation.
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SensioLabs
  • One negative thing to point out of Symfony is how painful it is to migrate legacy or relatively old projects from previous versions of Symfony into newer versions.
  • Symfony projects are usually reliable and provide the results you need.
  • Performance can be an issue sometime depending on the kind of project you are working on. Symfony can have some issues with cache.
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